Beastly Things

by Donna Leon

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then he’d be lucky to get a job as a museum guard, but he’d scorn that because he’s an art administrator,’ she said. In a kinder voice, she added, ‘He’s a bright boy and loves the subject, and for all I know would be perfect for a job in a museum. Only there are not going to be any jobs.’

  Brunetti thought of his son, now in his first year, and his daughter, soon to enter the university. ‘Does this mean my children face the same future?’

  She opened her mouth to speak but stopped herself.

  ‘Go ahead,’ Brunetti said. ‘Say it.’

  He saw the moment when she decided to do so. ‘Your wife’s family will see that they’re protected, or your father-in-law’s friends will see that they’re offered jobs.’

  Brunetti realized she never would have said something like this a few years ago and probably would never have said it now had he not provoked her with his reference to Griffoni. ‘The same as with the children of any well-connected family?’ he asked.

  She nodded.

  Suddenly mindful of her politics, he asked, ‘You don’t object to this?’

  She shrugged, then said, ‘Whether I do or I don’t won’t change it.’

  ‘Did it help you get your job at the bank?’ he asked, referring to the job she had left, more than a decade ago, to come and work at the Questura, a choice no one who worked with her had ever understood.

  She lifted her chin from her hand, saying, ‘No, my father didn’t help. In fact, he didn’t want me to work in a bank at all. He tried to convince me not to do it.’

  ‘Even though he was in charge of one?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Exactly. He said it had shown him how soul-rotting it was to work with money and to think about money all the time.’

  ‘But you did it anyway?’ Brunetti was still surprised to be engaged in this sort of conversation with her: their exchanges of personal information were usually cushioned by irony or masked by indirection.

  ‘For a number of years, yes.’

  ‘Until?’ he asked, wondering if he was about to unravel the secret that had rumbled through the Questura for years and aware that, should she tell him, he could never repeat it.

  Her smile changed and began to remind him of a famous one, last seen disappearing amidst the branches of a tree. ‘Until it began to rot my soul.’

  ‘Ah,’ Brunetti said, deciding that was all the answer he was going to get and probably all he wanted.

  ‘Will there be anything else, Signore?’ Before he could respond, she said, ‘They’ve sent the photos and videos from the protest.’

  Brunetti could not disguise his astonishment. ‘So fast?’

  Her smile was as compassionate as that of a Renaissance Madonna. ‘By computer, sir. They’re in your email.’ She glanced over his shoulder and studied the wall behind him for a few seconds, then added, ‘I have a friend who works in the central health office for the Veneto. I can ask him to have a look to see if there’s some central record kept of cases of this disease …’

  ‘Madelung,’ Brunetti supplied. The look she gave him showed him that the repetition was not necessary.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said to show there were no hard feelings, and then, ‘There might be numbers for the Veneto, if people are being treated.’

  ‘Rizzardi said he’d call someone he knows in Padova,’ Brunetti said, hoping to spare her the effort.

  She made a dismissive noise. ‘They might want an official request. Doctors often do,’ she said, as though she were a biologist speaking of some lower order of insect. ‘It could take days. Even longer.’ Brunetti appreciated her discretion in not bothering to say how quickly her friend might do it.

  ‘He was in the lane coming south when I saw him,’ he suddenly said.

  ‘Which means?’

  ‘He might have been coming down from Friuli. Could you ask your friend if they have the same sort of records, too?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said amiably. ‘The men who blocked the road were protesting about the new milk quotas, weren’t they?’ she asked. ‘Lowering production?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Greedy fools,’ she said with emphasis that surprised him.

  ‘You seem sure of that, Signorina,’ he remarked.

  ‘Of course I am. There’s too much milk, there’s too much cheese, there’s too much butter, and there are too many cows.’

  ‘Compared to what?’ he asked.

  ‘Compared to common sense,’ she said heatedly, and Brunetti wondered what he had stumbled into.

  Paola cooked with oil, not butter; he’d be sick if he had to drink a glass of milk, they did not eat much cheese, and Chiara’s principles had long since sent beef fleeing from their table, so Brunetti was – in terms of behaviour – on Signorina Elettra’s side of whatever principle was under discussion here. What he did not understand, however, was the force underlying her fervour, nor did he want to stand there and discuss it.

  ‘If you receive anything from your friend, let me know, would you?’

  ‘Of course, Commissario,’ she said with her usual warmth and turned to her computer. Brunetti decided to go and have a look for the dead man in the films they had been sent of the incident last autumn.

  Brunetti climbed the stairs to his office, reminding himself he could now access any video file that had been put into the new system.

  He opened his mail account and found the link. Within seconds, the screen showed him, first, the original report and the written notes of the individual officers who had been there. After he read those, he had no trouble opening the file containing the police videos and those from the television station. When he watched the first clip and saw the flames consuming the minivan bearing the Televeneto logo, he understood the station’s eagerness to cooperate.

  He watched the first two clips, each lasting only a few seconds, but there was no sign of the man, then another, without success. Then, in the fourth, the man appeared. He stood, as Brunetti now remembered him standing, at the edge of the traffic island that divided the north and south sections of the autostrada. He was on screen for only a few seconds, his head and his distinctive neck and torso visible in front of a red car stopped in the middle of the road. A few people, three men and a woman, stood next to him, all of them staring straight ahead. The camera panned back to show a single row of helmeted men moving forward, their transparent shields side by side, all of them united in lock step. The video ended.

  Brunetti opened the next one. This time the camera shot from behind the rank of Carabinieri as they approached the ragged group of farmers, their advancing line opening to flow around a car that had been set on fire. The next clip had been taken, it seemed, from a telefonino, but there was no identification of source: it could as easily belong to a police officer as some bystander whose phone had been sequestered. It showed a man slinging a pail of brown liquid at a carabiniere and hitting him square in the chest with it. The carabiniere retorted with a sidearm slash with his stick that caught the protestor on the lower arm and sent the pail into the air, with splashes flying from it as it disappeared to the right. The man bent forward, grabbing at his arm with his other hand, and was shoved to the ground by two Carabinieri. The video ended.

  He typed in Pucetti’s address and forwarded the email and attached video clips, shut down his computer, and went downstairs in search of the man himself.

  8

  BRUNETTI PAUSED AT the door of the officers’ squad room and had a look around. Vianello, talking to the new recruit, Dondini, had his back to the door. Pucetti, upon whose lowered face Brunetti could not help but read the results of their last interchange, seemed as oblivious to his surroundings as he was to the papers spread on the surface of his desk. The worst part of Brunetti was glad to see the younger man so preoccupied: it would spare the rest of them a lot of trouble in future if he learned greater discretion in breaking the rules and perhaps the law.

  ‘Pucetti,’ he called as he came in. ‘I’
ve got a favour to ask.’ He walked towards the young man’s desk, gesturing to Vianello to join them when he could.

  Pucetti shot to his feet, but he no longer snapped out a salute at the sight of his superior. ‘I’ve found the man who was in the canal this morning. Have you read the report?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Pucetti said.

  ‘There’s a series of videos from that incident with the farmers on the autostrada last year. He was there.’

  ‘You mean we arrested him?’ Pucetti asked with badly disguised astonishment. ‘And no one remembered?’ It was implicit in his tone that he would surely have remembered, but Brunetti let that pass.

  ‘No. He was there, but only as a spectator. There’s no mug shot,’ Brunetti said. ‘A video shows him standing at the side of the road, watching.’

  Pucetti could not hide his interest.

  ‘There’s something I’d like you to help me with,’ Brunetti said with a smile, and the younger man, much in the manner of a hunting dog who has heard a familiar whistle, all but went into point position.

  Vianello came over to them then and asked, ‘What did you find?’

  ‘A video with the man Rizzardi worked on this morning,’ Brunetti answered, disliking the verb as soon as he heard himself using it. ‘He was caught on the autostrada in that farmers’ protest last year.’ He told Pucetti about the email he had just sent him and said, ‘I’d like you to see if you can print out copies of specific frames.’

  ‘Nothing easier, sir,’ Pucetti said, in the eager voice Brunetti was accustomed to hearing him use. ‘Which one is he in?’

  ‘He’s in the fourth clip. Man with a dark beard; very thick shoulders and neck. I’d like you to see if you can stop it and get a picture of him we can use for identification.’ Before Pucetti could ask, Brunetti said, without explanation, ‘We can’t show a photo of him as he is.’

  Pucetti looked over at the officers’ computer, the same machine that had been there for years. ‘It would be much easier if I could work on this on my own equipment at home, sir,’ he said, not panting, but visibly keen to be let off the leash.

  ‘Then go and do it. If anyone asks, tell them it’s part of the murder investigation,’ he said, knowing that the only person likely to ask was Lieutenant Scarpa, the looming nemesis of the uniformed branch, Patta’s assistant, his eyes and ears. Then, in his automatic response to keep information from the Lieutenant, Brunetti amended this: ‘No, if anyone asks, better to say I’m sending you over to San Marco to get some papers from the Commissariat there.’

  ‘I’ll be as vague as I can be, sir,’ Pucetti said seriously. Brunetti caught Vianello’s fleeting grin.

  ‘Good.’ Turning to Vianello, Brunetti said, ‘There are some other things.’ He glanced at his watch to suggest that it was time to go and get a coffee.

  By the time Vianello had gone back to his desk and picked up his jacket, Pucetti had disappeared. On the way down to the bar at Ponte dei Greci, Brunetti told Vianello about the autopsy, the man’s strange disease, and his own certainty that he had seen him before, confirmed by the video that Pucetti had taken home to watch and copy.

  Still talking, Brunetti led the way into the bar. Bambola, the assistant to the owner, nodded as they passed him on their way to the booth at the back. Within minutes, he was there, carrying two coffees and two glasses of water, along with a plate with four pastries. He spread them on the table and went back to the bar.

  Brunetti picked up a brioche. It would soon be time for lunch, but so far that day he had seen the body of a murdered man; strongly reprimanded Pucetti, his favourite among the uniformed branch; Signorina Elettra had had a personal conversation with him; and the man who brought him his coffee was a Black African in a long white dress. ‘By the time we retire, Signorina Elettra will be coming to work in a ball gown and tiara, and Bambola will be sacrificing chickens in the back room,’ he observed to Vianello and took a bite of his brioche.

  Vianello sipped at his coffee and picked up a raisin-filled snail-shaped pastry and observed, ‘By the time we retire, we’ll be a colony of China, and Bambola’s children will be teaching at the university.’

  ‘I like the second part,’ Brunetti said, then asked, ‘You been reading your catastrophe books again, Lorenzo?’

  Vianello, as ever, had the grace to smile. He and Signorina Elettra were the declared ecologists at the Questura, though Brunetti had recently observed evidence that their ranks were growing; further, it had been some time since he had heard the epithet talibano dell’ecologia attributed to either of them. Foa had requested that fuel efficiency be made a consideration in all future purchases of police boats; fear of Signorina Elettra’s wrath kept everyone from placing the wrong sort of garbage in the receptacles located on every floor; and even Vice-Questore Patta had upon occasion been persuaded to use public transportation.

  ‘A proposito,’ he went on, ‘Signorina Elettra stopped herself just short of a denunciation of cows this morning; or rather, I stopped her. Do you have any idea what that’s all about?’

  Vianello picked up his second pastry, a dryish-looking thing covered with fragments of nuts. ‘The days of Heidi are over, Guido,’ he said and took a bite.

  ‘Which means?’ Brunetti asked, his own second pastry poised in the air.

  ‘Which means that there are too many cows, and we can’t afford to keep them or raise them or eat them any longer.’

  ‘“We” being?’ Brunetti inquired and took a bite.

  ‘“We” being the people in the developed world – which is just a euphemism for rich world – who eat too much beef and too many dairy products.’

  ‘Are you worried about health?’ Brunetti interrupted to ask, mindful of cholesterol levels, something he had never given any thought to, and curious about when and where Vianello and Signorina Elettra had their cell meetings.

  ‘No, not really,’ said a suddenly serious Vianello. ‘I’m thinking about those poor devils in what we aren’t allowed to call backward countries any more who have their forests cut down so big companies can raise meat to sell to rich people who shouldn’t be eating it anyway.’ He saw that his coffee cup was empty and took a drink of water. Then he surprised Brunetti by saying, ‘I think I don’t want to talk about this any more. Tell me about the man.’

  Brunetti pulled a pen from his jacket pocket and used a napkin to draw a rough duplicate of the sketch Bocchese had made of the murder weapon, careful to curve the blade up at the point. ‘This is the sort of knife that killed him. It’s about twenty centimetres long, very narrow. It went in three times. Lower back, right-hand side. The report – I haven’t read it yet – will tell exactly what it cut, but Rizzardi said he bled to death.’

  ‘In the water?’ Vianello said, putting his pastry back on the plate.

  ‘He was alive long enough to breathe in some water, but not long enough to drown. Bocchese and I talked about where it could have happened and how it could have been done. Either he was in a boat, which doesn’t sound right to me – too much risk of being seen, and Bocchese said there’s no sign of that sort of dirt on his clothing. Or they did it in a house and slid him in from the water door, or maybe it happened at the end of a calle, where it runs into the water, and they just tossed him in.’

  ‘Big chance of being seen, either way,’ Vianello observed. ‘Or heard.’

  ‘Less from a house, I think. Also less chance that anyone would have heard.’

  Vianello stared through the window of the bar, his eyes on the passers-by, his attention on the possibilities of the murder. After some time, he returned his attention to Brunetti and said, ‘Yes, a house sounds better. Any idea where?’

  ‘I haven’t seen Foa yet,’ Brunetti said, reminding himself to do this as soon as possible. ‘They found the man’s body at about six at the back of the Giustinian, in Rio del Malpaga. Foa should be able to calculate …’ Brunetti stopped himself from saying ‘the drift’, so appalling did he find the expression, and substituted
‘where he might have started from.’

  This time Vianello closed his eyes, and Brunetti watched him do exactly what he had: summon up the decades-old map the Inspector had in his memory and walk his way through the neighbourhood, checking the canals and, to the degree that he could, the direction of the water in the canals. He opened his eyes and looked at Brunetti. ‘We don’t know which way the tide was flowing.’

  ‘That’s why I have to talk to Foa.’

  ‘Good. He’ll know,’ Vianello said and pushed his way out of the booth. He went over to the bar and paid, waited for Brunetti to join him, then together they went back to the Questura, both of them keeping their eyes on the water in the canal that ran to their right, looking for motion and wondering which way the tide was flowing when the dead man went into the water.

  9

  AS HE ENTERED the Questura, Brunetti glanced at his watch and saw that it was after one; if he left now, he might still reach home in time to eat something. Again, the events of the day flowed through his mind, this time coloured by too much caffeine and sugar: why had he eaten two pastries when he knew he was supposed to go home? Was he some untutored youth, unable to resist the lure of sweet things?

  Turning to Vianello, he said, ‘I’ll be back after lunch. I’ll talk to Foa then.’

  ‘He’s not on shift until four, anyway. Plenty of time.’

  Brunetti, the two brioches rumbling at him from inside, decided to walk all the way home but then immediately changed his mind and walked up the Riva degli Schiavoni to get the vaporetto.

  Within five minutes, he had begun to regret his decision. Instead of being able to walk untroubled and uncrowded through Campo Santa Maria Formosa and Campo Santa Marina before confronting the inevitable logjam of Rialto, he had chosen to launch himself directly into the flood of tourists, even here. As he turned right on the riva, he saw the onrushing wave of them, though they moved far more slowly than any wave he had ever encountered.